THE LISTENER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Listener, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

The protagonist of The Listener volunteers for a helpline, which people call when they're in emotional or psychological distress and in need of some non-emergency help. The setting is the volunteer's quiet home in the middle of the night, when people typically find themselves thinking those dark thoughts and alone without a sympathetic ear to hear them spoken. The callers are numerous and, for the most part, sincerely in pain, not quite knowing what to do about it at the moment.

This is the simple setup of Alessandro Camon's screenplay, which pretty much gets right to its point and barely relents from the cavalcade of people's suffering. It's a one-note narrative, to be sure, with the only variations of that note being the tone, the length, the specific content, and the resolution—or, often, the lack thereof—of each of the phone calls.

As a story, there's not much to Camon's script, but as drama, it's generally fascinating and occasionally compelling stuff. As a movie, the material probably would have been better served as an audio presentation, but that doesn't stop director Steve Buscemi from using these inherent limitations in intriguing ways.

First and foremost, there's the casting of the volunteer, who calls herself "Beth," although she's quick to point out to anyone who asks that it's not her real name. Beth is played by Tessa Thompson, whose presence here radiates effortless patience, complete compassion, genuine thoughtfulness, and just the hint of some secret life that comes to the surface whenever one of her callers triggers some thought or memory from her character's hidden past.

Many say that the art of acting is, not in the performance of dialogue and action, but in the process of reaction. Thompson's work here makes an excellent case for that theory, since most of her performance amounts to, as the title clearly suggests, listening—truly listening to what's being said by the people on the other end of the line—and determining what those words mean for the callers, for Beth's goal to provide them with some form of comfort, and to her.

Yes, Thompson's voice here is key when she does speak, gently probing for information and calmly offering advice or some other way of looking at a problem. While that supports the argument that maybe a cinematic approach to this script isn't the most dramatically logical one, Buscemi's camera rarely leaves its star, who appears often in close-up and whose face it finds even if it's looking elsewhere (e.g., in the reflection of a window as Beth looks out upon her neighborhood). The filmmaker knows we're not just listening. We're watching, too, and Thompson's face, then, is as much a driving force for the drama as the many, many voices we hear over the phone.

The voices are sometimes recognizable, and even if they're not, the names of the actors providing them in the credits might be. They include Alia Shawkat, Logan Marshall-Green, Margaret Cho, and, for the story's climactic discussion, Rebecca Hall. It's a sizeable and somewhat notable cast, but unless someone is gifted (or cursed) with the ability to recognize the specific vocal qualities of particular actors, it's not a distraction. They just sound like regular old people—suffering or scared or uncertain about life, as well as how they perceive it, in some way and reaching out for someone to hear, as well as offer some understanding about, what they're experiencing.

As such, the narrative here is essentially episodic, and each episode is a call, existing in isolation from all the others and as a short piece of drama. There are a few through lines, although not many to tie them together on a thematic level beyond the basics, and for the most part, there's no resolution to most of the calls, either.

That's the job for Beth, and once we finally get to know some things about her, it's one of the parts of the job that she doesn't like. How does one take on the aching hearts and confused minds of some many people over the course of a single night without being haunted by their sudden absence, especially without knowing whether or not the conversation helped them in any way?

Some of these discussions do haunt. One man, a military veteran, tells the story of a recurring dream he has and how he's certain it means some sort of condemnation for what he did overseas. A Sherrif calls, explaining how he knows things about a police shooting that almost certainly shouldn't have been cleared by an official review. A runaway teen explains how her boyfriend has a temper and scares her, only for the call to end just as he returns. There are no answers to these stories and others, and gradually, the weight of that fills the atmosphere of this quiet, dark, and lonely house.

Is that enough for both drama and a movie? That's another question that lingers here, and it's obviously on Camon's mind, too, if only because the most significant call of The Listener is loaded with Beth's back story, an ethical debate about suicide, and the suspense of hearing someone who has apparently determined an answer to that question. Like some of the episodes here, it's intense stuff, but it also highlights how inherently choppy and thin the drama of this narrative is.

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